NY Times Article There's an interesting article in today's New York Times called What the Mexicans Might Learn From the Italians that can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/01/weekinreview/01blumenthal.html?ref=weekinreview It retells the story of the joint Italian-American effort that began in 1984 to break what was then called the "Pizza Connection" which was a billion dollar pipeline and control center for the importation of heroin into the US. FBI agentss and other enforcement officers operated in Italy and Sicily conducting "operations that the Italian police lacked the legal authority to do in their own country — making drug buys, for example, and eavesdropping and conducting electronic surveillance." The article touches on the bill RG speaks of in her post and mentions that the Mexicans consider the US the source of the weapons being used by the cartels. It makes for an interesting read. Did you know that by law, Mexican enforcement agents are not allowed to make drug buys? So much for infiltration and resource recruitment.
Mix - That was an interesting read, thanks for posting it. Here's an article I read in the NYT the other day that discusses the apparent increase in corruption among U.S. Border Patrol agents since the US has upped border security. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/us/27border.html? It makes sense to me that as it gets harder to smuggle people and drugs into the States that there will be both more violence in Mexico and more corruption among U.S. Border Patrol agents. If authorities really want to fight this war they need to stop the impunity. Right now the mafias in Mexico can often be confident that they can buy police and judges and prevent real investigations from even taking place. To nab the mafias they would need to tap lots of cell phones and slowly build cases against key figures. But I just can't see Mexican authorities being clean enough to pull off a big investigation like that, someone would tip off someone and that would blow the whole thing. Meanwhile when I walk the beach I find bags of what looks like heroin that have washed ashore and then have to keep my dog from playing with them... Such is life in paradise.
Is this all over now? I need to pick my Mum up from the airport at 3pm and wondering if it is going to be chaos?
Calderon arrived yesterday (Sunday). They closed the airport down for a while for him. The airport should be ok today.
It has to do with a military expo, they were also there all last week and they have an expo of sorts at the convention center or did last week anyway
All the extrange activities were because President Calderon was coming to the Marine Day. Furhter more it was a disaster; it rain all day, ports were closed and President airplane sits on the airport on an unusuall way closing 4 of the 6th ganways to flights.
